Rutgers is a classic 3R tomato, it's round, red, and reliable. It's been grown for nearly 70 years, making it an heirloom type simply because of its longevity as a favorite for home growers and farmers too. Any tomato can be cooked but choosing them are based on your preferences. DETs are varieties which have an expected or determinable height, they crop the majority of their fruits all at once, flowering and fruiting drops dramatically after that and so, just for convenience, you can yank the plants after you crop them and give the ground over to another plant. INDs have an indetermined length, they just keep growing and growing and flowering and fruiting along their stems until the plant is killed by frost or disease. Pastes and beefsteaks generally are meaty fruits, not as juicy, drippy, slurpy as others and do quite well for sauce or slicing. Globes or Oblates (slightly flattened fruits) are all-purpose and do well for salad, slice or stuffing--baked or fresh. Small fruited tomatoes are nice for salad or tossing into a saute pan. They can be cooked whole or just slice in half to prepare them. Hubs likes cherries, they're convenient snack-sized tomatoes, juicy and sweet. He's also fond of tomato salad made by chunking up something ripe off the vine and stirring in just a dibdab of mayo. Heirlooms or heritage types can be red, but a good many are not. They come in all colors of the rainbow--the purple or black types aren't really purple or black, but are shades of brick. White tomatoes aren't white, they're cream to pale yellow in color. There are GWRs--which are Green when Ripe--they don't have a color gene and just ripen to green hue, some, like most tomatoes, will develop a rosy blush as they ripen and sweeten. And there are bi-colors too, which may have more than two colors, like Berkeley Tie Die, Black and Red Boar, or Striped German--to name a few. Shapes are varied. Currants, cherries, grapes, saladettes, round, oblate, beefsteak, ruffled, pear-shaped, plums (which can also be elongated). Some tomatoes have shoulders, some have nipples (giggety), some have a few cavities where seeds develop and some have more but smaller cavities where their seeds develop, and some seem to be all wall--and these are nice for stuffing--that's a trait called Puffiness. And then there's different foliage types--there's one called Silvery Fir Tree which makes really odd leaves which you can gather from the name. Strangeness is part of the passion of growing heirlooms--they're not all 3Rs, and flavor is part of the love. If you're new to growing tomatoes from seed then selection of what you want to grow can be overwhelming. It's akin to walking into a wine store and wanting something that tastes good but you don't know where to begin. So, because of the overwhelming amount of choices I am happy to select for people--I understand that it's tough to decide if you're new to the hobby. At WinterSown.Org there's an order form which you fill out with your choices and defaults--people who want me to choose for them just send in the blank form. I look at the address that the seeds are going to and I use locality as a guide for beginning the selection process. If someone lives in North Dakota then it doesn't make sense for me to select a tomato that will mature in 90 days after being set out into the garden--they need a tomato which will ripen before their first freeze in later summer or very early Autumn. And conversely, people who live in the deep hot south will also need fast maturing varieties because hot, hot summer weather causes malformation of blossom and fruiting is very, very difficult until the cooler weather comes along. If you're in zone 6 and 7 and 8 you can grow just about any tomato in your climate and expect a success, you may still have your local disease pressures, but growing season nice and long. Zones 9 and 10, Zones 5 and 4, are going to need fast cropping tomatoes.

Dawn, I was going to post the info but see you beat me to it. I'll attach the one that goes to the page about tomato varieties. I feel it has a lot of very good information. I have never grown Moreton but have grown Ramapo. It didn't stand out the year I grew it. But again many that do well elsewhere struggle here. It did produce a moderate amount late. It did have good flavor. The site has some very good info like you said even if a person isn't interested in the varieties they offer. Jay Here is a link that might be useful: Tomato Varieties

Oldokie, Well there is never any guarantee that I'll get ripe tomatoes before frost, but I usually do. I generally put my fall tomatoes into either the ground or containers in July. Then I just try to keep them alive and growing until the temperatures cool off in the fall. Sometimes I don't plant new tomato plants, but just coddle the spring tomatoes and baby them along until the weather cools. Sometimes I cut them back about 50% in July after most of the harvest is done, and water them well and they make great regrowth before fall. Once the weather cools, of course they bloom and set fruit. When cool nights are forecast, I cover the plants with Agribon floating row cover. I have it in two different weights--the lighter one gives 2-4 degrees of frost proteciton, and the heavier one gives 6-8 degrees of frost protection. If we expect the overnight low to be really cold, I throw a moving blanket over each plant, using clothespins to attach it to the tomato cage. If the fall tomatoes are in containers, I can move them into the greenhouse which will keep them slightly warmer than the outside air. Before I had the greenhouse, I'd just drag the plants in containers into the garage on cold nights. This year, I kept them in the greenhouse until December and they produced a lot of fruit very late. I have had years where the first killing frost or freeze hit really hard really early and I knew I couldn't protect the plants enough to keep them alive, so I just harvested all the fruit green and brought it inside. Some of the fruit I kept, and many of those ripened very slowly on the kitchen counter. I gave several grocery bags full of green tomatoes to a friend who wanted to make chow-chow. With fall tomatoes, there's never any guarantee of getting a harvest, but I'd say I get a harvest from them most years. Like everything else involving gardening in Oklahoma, the results vary a lot from year to year. Dawn

No wonder I'm confused! Excuse my ignorance, but how can one named tomato be so many different varieties? And how can companies "alter" one variety and still call it the same thing? I guess I don't understand the legal aspects of naming varieties. **** Sandy, it's not many varieties it's different versions of the same variety. Any compnay can breed in tolerance to V or F or whatever. it's been done with lots of varieties, mainly older commercial OP's as well, of course with modern hybrids. It's much better than a single variety having more than one name and that too happened in the late 1800's through maybe the 1920's or so. I could list here just one variety and a list of known synonyms for that same variety. The seed business back then was cut throat, that's for sure, and there are no laws that apply to any naming of varieties back then and there still are no laws that pertain to the naming of varieties today, just patents for some of the more recent hybrids. If it's an indeterminate Rutgers you're after, why not try the Fedco source and see what you get. (So it seems there's no way of knowing which variety we grew in the 1950s & 60s. I'll just have to order seeds from several companies and grow them out next season and see which I like best now.) I'm not sure if you're talking here to Rutgers or not, but if so, then the most common form of Rutgers grown in the 50's and 60's was the semi-det/det one. I hate to say it but I'm old enough to remember my father growing it at our farm back then, along with several other well know commecial varieties such as Valiant, New Yorker, Manalucie, and friends. There are many of the older commercial varieties that are listed at Sandhill Preservation and lots more listed in the SSE Yarbook for SSE members. Trust me, all is not lost.(smile) Carolyn